Katha Pollitt: Lifestyles of the Rich and Generous?

The gods of publishing must have had a good laugh when they arranged for the philosopher Peter Singer to bring out The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty in the middle of the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression. First Worlders have a moral obligation to give away thousands of dollars--thousands!--a year of personal income to eradicate Third World poverty? Right. Even when Americans had jobs and 401(k)s, they weren't exactly emptying their wallets for the 1.4 billion people who live in absolute destitution--$1.25 a day or less--in the developing world. How much harder to get people to give when money is tight, so many are broke and even those who are doing all right are worried and afraid for their future.

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Even today, though, as Singer would be the first to remind us, an ordinary middle-class American lives like Louis XIV compared to the destitute villagers and slum dwellers of Africa, Asia and elsewhere around the globe. Singer can sound a bit puritanical when he scoffs at our outlays on $4 lattes, restaurant meals, concerts, movies, that second glass of wine we don't really want and the $600 worth of clothes in their closet that women supposedly haven't worn for a year. Bottled water comes in for special scorn. His point, though, isn't that we should forgo all pleasure but that we have more disposable income than we think we do--enough to save the lives of many people. If you put it like that--hmm, do I go out for pie or vaccinate ten children?--the answer is pretty clear.

Singer suggests that those in the bottom half of the top 10 percent--those who make between $105,001 and $148,000--give 5 percent of their income, with graduated increases for those who make more. In other words, a person who made $147,000 would give $7,350, leaving him/her a comfortable $139,650 to live on. If the nearly 15 million people in the top 10 percent followed his proposal, they would generate $471 billion for the Third World poor. If those below gave just 1 percent of their income, the total would increase to $510 billion. If the rest of the developed world followed suit, the total would be eight times what the United Nations estimates is needed to reach the Millennium Development Goals for global health, education, employment, gender equality and so on by 2015.